Blue Ox school marches on, despite budget crunch

More than 50 former students recently showed up to the Blue Ox Community School's first reunion.

For Eric and Viviana Hollenbeck, who founded the millworks school in 1999 to reach kids who hadn't faired well in traditional schools, it was a special moment, made all the more special by the fact that the vast majority of the school's alumni are thriving as chefs, stone masons, electricians, roofers and more.

"We had every trade under the sun there," Eric Hollenbeck said. "We just finished our 12th year with this program and it's been very successful for these young people."

That success made recent news that the program's 12th year may have been its last all the more distressing. It also spawned an all out effort by the Hollenbecks to save the program from the state budget ax that has wreaked havoc on public education in recent years and has the Humboldt County Office of Education's Community School Program hundreds of thousands of dollars in the red.

"Because of the economic conditions in the state right now, the office of education is having to try and pull in all the reins they possibly can to weather the storm," Eric Hollenbeck explained. "They've been hit harder than they've ever been hit before."

But the Hollenbecks have worked closely with the county office of education to chart a course to cut the program's expenses while keeping it alive and, possibly, even open the millworks experience up to more students.

Humboldt County Superintendent of Schools Garry Eagles said the problem is local schools are only receiving 77 percent of the state funding that is owed to them due to the state's budget crisis. Consequently, he said, local education is confronted with difficult choices at every turn. Among the hardest hit, Eagles said, has been the community school program -- which serves about 400 students in grades seven through 12 who have been referred by the court system, been kicked out of other schools or, for a variety of reasons, just aren't a good fit for traditional classrooms.

"Our community school program is a couple hundred thousand dollars upside down because of the cuts from the state," Eagles said.

Since 1999, Blue Ox Community School has taken about 25 kids a year and put them through a rigorous academic program that pairs a traditional curriculum with a craft-based one that teaches traditional skills like woodworking, blacksmithing, typesetting and more. The result is students who learn about physics and chemistry while hammering out hot metal, or bookkeeping skills while running the millworks shop, which sells their wares.

"The mill has been a very successful strategy for reaching students in a very nontraditional way," Eagles said. "We want to preserve as much of that opportunity as we can."

But the program had to cut costs. As a result, Blue Ox Community School students will no longer spend their mornings in their own school building adjacent to the millworks property and will no longer remain together as a 25-student unit throughout the day. Instead, the students will take morning classes in the county Office of Education's Educational Resource Center on Sixth Street in Eureka and travel over to the millworks in the afternoon for the hands-on activities.

While the students will spend the bulk of their morning in courses unrelated to Blue Ox, they will have a special homeroom period, Eric Hollenbeck said, during which instructors will do what they can to meld what the students are doing in the classroom with the millworks activities, trying to maintain the connection between the old-school crafts and the traditional school curriculum that has been so successful.

"The hope is that this is a stop-gap measure," Eric Hollenbeck said, "and that we'll soon go back to doing what we were doing."

Eric Hollenbeck said he's hopeful the school can return to its own site soon, in part, because it brings the program's students closer together.

"The thing that worked so well is that little, one-room schoolhouse concept, where you've got youngsters of different ages and skill levels mentoring each other," he said. "It's that unit feeling. They become a family, a unit together."

Because the program will be vacating its current site, it means changes are also in store for Blue Ox Community Radio, 97.7 FM, which is housed in the school building.

Viviana Hollenbeck said the station will now be moving onto the Blue Ox Millworks property, which she said will ultimately be a good thing, as the largely student-run station will now be in the thick of the bustling property, even able to do on-site interviews with tourists.

"It's going to be in the flow in a very neat and dramatic way," Viviana Hollenbeck said.

As the county office of education continues to work through its budget woes -- Eagles said he and the Hollenbecks are currently trying to figure out a way to save the auto shop program -- the Hollenbecks are also looking to the future, and are in the midst of forming a nonprofit organization. Eric Hollenbeck said the ultimate vision is to purchase a property adjoining the millworks.

"The hope is to build a craftsman's village," he said. "When we do, the first building we put up will be a classroom."

Eric Hollenbeck said he's in the process of scheduling meetings with various local civic groups to build support for both Blue Ox's long-term vision and also to solicit donations to help pay for its current educational program. For more information on the mill and the school, visit www.blueoxmill.com.